The Morning Every Tab Was Paid

I had thirty-eight families on the book that November. Milk, bread, eggs, flour, baby formula, a bag of dry beans. A tab at my store is for the week the plant cut hours, or the month the truck broke down, or the winter a man’s breathing machine ran up a bill he could not carry.

Some paid on the first of the month, ten dollars, twenty, whatever came. A few had not paid in a year, and I had stopped asking.

The point was that nobody in Pine Flat went to bed hungry because they were short on a Tuesday. I was raised on that, and I never thought of it as kindness. I thought of it as the job.

Marcelle came in at seven. She runs the deli counter and does the books, and after thirty-six years of marriage she reads my face in the morning the way other people read a weather report.

“Til,” she said. “What’s wrong?”

I pushed the ledger across the counter, open to Burdette’s page, and set the deposit bag on top of it, and I said nothing.

She read the page. She turned to the next one. She read the card with the dime and the nickel, and her hand went up to her mouth.

“Who was in here?”

“I don’t know. Somebody with a flat pencil.”

“Tilford. Somebody was in this store in the night.”

“Somebody was in this store in the night and left us seventeen thousand dollars,” I said.

I had counted it by then. It came to $17,408.15, the very total Marcelle had penciled at the bottom of the last page on the thirtieth of October, after our monthly sit-down at the kitchen table. Whoever it was had read that total and brought it to the penny.

I did not call the sheriff. Everyone asked me why, later. Nothing had been taken. Nobody had been hurt. Somebody had come into my store in the dark to hand me money, and I could not think of a deputy in the county who would know what to write on the form.

The back door key hangs on a nail inside the loading dock, behind a feed sack. It has hung there since 1971, and every soul in Pine Flat over fifty knows it. I will not call that a security system. It is just a fact about my town.

We sat in the office with the door shut and the coffee going cold.

“Til, we were going to stop the book at New Year’s.”

“I know.”

“I’ve got the sign in my purse.”

“I know that too. I wrote it.”

I had. A copy was in my shirt pocket that very morning, folded in quarters, and I could feel the corner of it against my chest the whole time I stood in the dark with the ledger. It said, Effective January 1, Brasfield’s Grocery can no longer extend credit. We are sorry.

The dollar store out in Harlow had taken a third of our shelf business. The sawmill had closed in September, eighty-some jobs gone in one week. The poultry plant was running people twenty-four hours instead of forty.

Marcelle had laid the numbers out in October, and they were not mean, they were just numbers. A store my size could carry seventeen thousand dollars of paper for about one more winter, and we had been carrying it for four.

We had both cried a little over that sign. Neither of us would admit it to the other.

“Somebody knew,” Marcelle said now. “Somebody knew we were about to quit.”